In September 2014, we launched a comprehensive discussion of social and organizational change horizons. We tapped insights from Margaret Wheatley, framed here: Wheatley on Social Innovation: Do We Regroup? Our general takeaway was that social change inside organizations and out remains incredibly difficult. We agreed there are many in-depth discussions ahead to unpack it all. And we shared an overarching question: How might we best make progress?

Here are the discussion threads we surfaced to guide our chats in 2015.  As you have time, review these topics, and tweet out about those you find the most interesting, useful and relevant in the near term. We’ll pick up and extend the conversation in our monthly Twitter exchanges.

Our next #cdna chat is scheduled for Monday FEB 16 at 9 p.m. ET.

• Q1. SOCIAL CHANGE vs. INNOVATION
  • a. Gap perception: grappling with ‘what needs to happen’ vs. ‘what’s been achieved’ (Tony)
  • b. Innovating within our sphere of influence. (Scott). We discussed this in some detail during our January 2015 chat, with this frame, and the transcript here; thanks to Scott Smith for teeing this up and for being our guest moderator. What more can we learn from this discussion?
  • c. Does the conversation take us toward Asimov’s ‘Psychohistory’? (Scott)
  • d. Change v. innovation: are both like ‘deviance’ .. in the end, subjective? relative? (Kim)
  • e. Not all social change is innovative (Kim)
  • f. Midgley’s boundary critique: who decides? who gets marginalized? (Alice)
• Q2. MOTIVATION
  • a. Harmonizing motivation (Christy), perhaps via Maslow’s ‘pack’ response? (Jamie)
  • b. Gaming self and team to stay in flow (Christy)
  • c. Spreading methods (Christy)
  • d. Planning for change around adoption curves (Mike)
  • e. Does economic pain trump all other motivators? (Jamie)
• Q3. CULTURAL FORCES AND TIME DIMENSION
  • a. Cultural resistance: our brains’ firmware seems programmed to hesitate (Scott)
  • b. Prescriptive behavior (Redge); market imperatives taken to be givens (Paul)
  • c. The function of speed vs. perceived value, and challenge of normalizing (Christy)
  • d. Wheatley: we are not in charge of time arc of change, or its scope, reach or uptake (Kim)
• Q4. CHANGE DRIVERS
  • a. Visionary leadership (Tony), and a capacity to see a different world (Paul)
  • b. Case studies for social change: IBM/Gerstner, Apple/Jobs, GE/Welch (Chris, Redge)
  • c. Modeling change from a place of integrity (David)
  • d. Empowered individuals as means to disrupt cliques (David)

Click on the hyperlinked author to see the original tweet, or check out the cdna 9/15 transcript to see the conversation. Thanks as always for the investment of time, insights and positive energy. We always learn something.

Chris (aka @sourcepov)